Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Israeli Transportation Ministry is working on a plan to build an artificial island off the coast of Gaza, where a Palestinian-run airport and seaport would eventually be located. Ministry spokesman Ilan Leizerovich told the Associated Press that this would allow Israel to cut all ties with Hamas-ruled Gaza.

The majority of consumer goods and people who are allowed to enter and exit Gaza utilize Israeli land crossings. "Full disengagement" would follow this fanciful plan, and within six years the demilitarized zone of this island would be patrolled by international forces.

Leizerovich said the island would be built about three miles (4.5 kilometers) off the Gaza coast and would be connected by a bridge. He said it would take about six years and cost more than $5 billion to build. The grandiose scheme would need additional government approval, Palestinian acceptance and funding.

They'll also need a bridging loan, I guess. And few people reckon on a Dubai-style high style man-made island like the rather sci-fi one pictured above. According to the news station that broke the story, Channel 2, Israel would control and oversee all construction - to prevent concrete and other materials to be appropriated for covert rocket launchers. (The state of the art short range rocket shield, the Iron Dome, was deployed today for the first time over Beersheba.) Official discussions about the possibility of annexing West Bank settlements into Israel also created controversy.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

In a life famously shared with seven husbands, Taylor’s relationship with Israel was one of her longest, writes Nathan Burstein in the Washington Post.

It began in 1959, when Taylor, then a recent convert to Judaism, purchased Israel Bonds in such volumes that her films were boycotted in Arab nations. The elements of the story are so mismatched — the sultry starlet and the Third World country then absorbing displaced Jews from the Arab world — that it makes your eyes pop, as Taylor did in so many of her films.

Eight years and two Oscars later, Taylor canceled a visit to Moscow to protest the U.S.S.R.’s condemnation of Israel in the Six Day War. She would later sign a letter denouncing the United Nations’ odious “Zionism is racism” resolution, and in 1976, she offered to trade places with one of the hostages held by Palestine Liberation Organization hijackers from a flight originating in Tel Aviv. (Her willingness to become a hostage didn’t lead anywhere in real life, but she eventually got to play one in a TV version of the incident, ABC’s “Victory at Entebbe.”)

She was Hollywood’s most famous Cleopatra, and she stayed involved in the Middle East long after her career slowed down. She lent her star power to Israel with a 1982-83 visit — she met with Prime Minister Menachem Begin — and by publicly supporting the right of the Soviet Union’s trapped Jewry to emigrate there.

Like her old-school glamour and professional roots in the original studio system, Taylor’s activism for Israel was, in many ways, an artifact of a different era. An increasingly cynical world challenged the actress and Israel in similar ways, with their idealized early images coming back to haunt them. Taylor, it turned out, was merely mortal, and prone to tabloid-worthy missteps despite her preternatural beauty. Israel, with its foundations in Jewish desperation and trauma, could be as dysfunctional and disappointing as any other nation.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Up against the WallSarah Palin, the ex-candidate and present day minor celebrity, apparently had second thoughts about crossing an Israeli checkpoint on Monday to visit Bethlehem during a three-day visit to Jerusalem. Why didn't she cross over by foot, like most Christian tourists, and hire a Bethlehem-based guide? Conal Urquhart reports from the Holy Land for the Guardian newspaper:

The former governor of Alaska pulled up to the checkpoint run by the Israeli border police to the south of Jerusalem in a white people carrier, with her husband, Todd, her assistant and Israeli guides.

None of the occupants left the car nor did they speak to the police officers at the checkpoint, according to photographers at the scene. They then turned around and drove away. A spokesman for the Israeli police said there was no incident at the checkpoint and a spokesman for the Israeli army said that Palin's group had not co-ordinated a visit to the occupied Palestinian territory.

Palin's group then stopped at a nearby Greek Orthodox monastery before returning to her hotel in the centre of west Jerusalem from where they later continued their tour of the city.

Tourists need to carry passports to cross checkpoints into the occupied Palestinian territory and Israelis are not normally permitted to enter areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, such as Bethlehem.

From the checkpoint Palin would have been able to see the high concrete walls that separate Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

Palin arrived in Israel on Sunday night after a delivering a speech in India on a rare foreign trip. She is due to meet Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on Monday evening.

On arriving in Jerusalem Palin visited the tunnels next to the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, which is believed to have been part of the walls of the Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans in 70AD.

Palin wore a Star of David, the symbol of Judaism, around her neck, prayed close to the wall and lodged a written prayer in a crevice, according to tradition.

Palin told reporters: " It's overwhelming to be able to see and touch the cornerstone of our faith. I'm so thankful to be able to be here and I'm thankful to know the Israel-American connection will grow and strengthen as the peace negotiations continue."

Danny Danon, the Likud party member of the Knesset who invited Palin to Israel and accompanied her to the Western Wall, said Palin was moved by being close to the wall. "The visit was educational and spiritual. She was a strong friend of Israel and she will become a stronger advocate of Israel in the future," he said.

"The main purpose of the visit was to get acquainted with Israel and the holy sites. It was her first visit but I am sure she will come again."

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Many booklovers in Jerusalem are in despair. Munther Fahmi is the founder and owner of the Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. He has been a friend and partner to PalFest since the beginning and his bookstore is a cornerstone of cultural life in Jerusalem. He offers an incredibly wide range of titles and fights to maintain a small but vital space of free and independent thought and debate in Jerusalem. Jews, Muslims, Gentiles, Christians and tourists of all descriptions all are welcome in his store.

He is being threatened with deportation. If authorities take away his ID, and the IDF can for the most whimsical of reasons and claim that it is a security matter, Fahmi will no longer be allowed inside Jerusalem.

People across the world are collecting signatures to try and help him stay in the city of his birth. Here's the online petition

Hat tip to Matt Rees, the ex-journalist who pens detective books, for the info.

Friday, March 04, 2011

A cold dose of Israelity came a decade after the wedding day for ten Israeli Arab women who were told about their husbands' deceit by government officials.Mistaarvim and Mrs? Ten odd couples are revealed in a fascinating piece running in Ynet's magazine. Shin Bet orchestrated double lives for their agents, with a plausible cover story for "young vigorous men" to find spouses in Arab communities inside Israel, from Jaffa. Read about the fallout six decades later:

"Your husband is not who you think he is. He is not Arab. Your husband is a Jew who was sent into your village on a mission by the defense establishment." This was the news a few Israeli Arab women received from the head of the Mossad Intelligence Servicemission in France in 1964. This was how they discovered that the fathers of their children were serving in a top secret Israeli unit sent to spy in their villages.

Ten Jewish men assimilated into Arab communities in the early 1950s, marrying local women and starting families with them, all the while serving in the Shin Bet as "mistaarvim," (literally, masqueraders) - undercover agents posing as Palestinians.

The goal of the unit, which was established in 1952, was to have men on the inside in case a war breaks out, and the Israeli Arabs join the enemy. Shumel Moriah, a senior Shin Bet officer who came to Israel from Iraq, and had plenty of experience smuggling Jews into Israel, led the unit. He recruited 10 other Iraqi-born men for the complex mission.

The unit was disbanded over a decade after its establishment, which was when the wives were informed of the deception. Most of them converted and lived in Israel as Jews. Their children were recognized as Jews without undergoing an official conversion procedure.

The training process took one year; the men learned the Palestinian dialect, studied the Koran and espionage techniques in an Intelligence Corps base near Ramla. With a new identity and a detailed cover story, they were sent into Palestinian villages and cities. They pretended to be refugees from the 1948 war returning home. Their real families in Israel were kept in the dark about their whereabouts and activities; they were forbidden from trying to discover where their loved ones served.

Hat tip to Gideon for this link. The full story is here.http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4031176,00.html

Answer a fool according to his folly

Click here for writer Israel Shamir's point by point Answer to a Jewish Chain Letter...one of those annoying screeds that brandish Jewish claims to the Palestinian territories.

otherwise occupied

Israeli Settlements

Homes in Judea and Samaria riddle the West Bank

Atheists on the bus - one way to eliminate Holy Wars. But godlessness is not an option for many people in our part of the world.

Glib Clips

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RULES OF THE GAME

Rule #1: In the Middle East, it is always the Palestinians that attack first, and it's always Israel who defends itself. This is called "retaliation".

Rule #2: The Palestinians are not allowed to kill Israelis. This is called "terrorism".

Rule #3: Israel has the right to kill Palestinian civilians; this is called "self-defense", or "collateral damage".

Rule #4: When Israel kills too many Palestinian civilians, the Western world calls for restraint. This is called the "reaction of the international community".

Rule #5: Palestinians do not have the right to capture Israeli military, not even 1 or 2.

Rule #6: Israel has the right to capture as many Palestinians as they want (over 10,000 to date being held without trial). There is no limit; there is no need for proof of guilt or trial. All that is needed is the magic word: "terrorism".

Rule #7: When you say "Hamas", always be sure to add "supported by Hezbollah, Syria and Iran".

Rule #8: When you say "Israel", never say "supported by the USA, the UK, European countries and even some Arab regimes", for people (God forbid) might believe this is not an equal conflict.

Rule #9: When it comes to Israel, don't mention the words "occupied territories", "UN resolutions", "Geneva conventions". This could distress the audience of Fox, CNN, etc.

Rule #10: Israelis tend to speak better English than Arabs. This is why it is called "balanced journalism".

Kudos for israelity bites

Time Magazine's Middle East blog cites israelity bites as "a personal favorite" , while the London Times and slate.com have linked to our recent scoops. Even got a plug from the Libertarian Popinjay of Las Vegas:)"a Middle Eastern website called 'Israelity Bites'. Brilliant! Comedians could learn from this url." And ironhead posted, "
If Israelitybites the blog says it, then I believe.LOL.The truth is out there..." Sarcastic? You be the judge.

entering Israel

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which cited statistics from the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, between 2000 and 2008, "Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories killed more than 2,000 Palestinian civilians not involved in combat. Of 1,246 criminal investigations initiated during the same period into suspected offenses of all kinds by soldiers against Palestinian civilians, only 6 percent (78 cases) resulted in indictments. Only 13 of those indictments charged soldiers with killing civilians. As of September 2008, five soldiers had been convicted for the deaths of four civilians"

Like it?

Gush Shalom

subversive text? click to see

Talking Points

AA./ “I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.” The Palestinian Authority has “an enormous desire to destroy Israel.” --Newt Gingrich

A./ "The UN was born of the ashes of the Holocaust and so was Israel... we have a lot in common." Chris Gunness, UNWRA

B./ “I don’t often spend the night in Jerusalem. I’ll go professionally or to see friends. It is hyperactive. Everyone is expecting something, either the messiah or disaster or both. Tel Aviv is becoming more and more Mediterranean, like the South of France, whereas Jerusalem is moving in the direction of, I don’t know where, maybe like Qum, in Iran.” --author Amos Oz in the New Yorker.

C./ "We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years, neither the United Nations, nor the U.S.A, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Ariel Sharon to Winston S. Churchill III in 1973.

D./The world will judge the Jewish state by the way it will treat the Arabs." --Chaim Weizmann, father of modern Zionism.

E./"Obama and I don't just share a home state. We also share exotic names that were given to us by our fathers--Barack, which in Swahili means 'blessed,' and Rahm, which, roughly translated from Hebrew, means 'go screw yourself.'"--Rahm Emanuel, WHite House CHief of Staff

G./ "Israel is the country of immigrants and refugees, survivors and displaced people from all over the world. We weren't occupiers, and we didn't want to be occupiers. We were thrown into a historic situation that we have not managed to get out of. We are a torn nation. The occupation is destroying us. We have no right to control another nation. Our leaders and the leaders of the Palestinian people must do everything to get out of this situation." --Eli Amir, Israeli author

H./"It isn't easy to love Israel and it isn't easy to be a friend of Israel. I must personally admit that I love Israel even when I can't stand it. It's no coincidence that during a year when it's tough to love Israel, it's easier to love its literature. Israeli literature delivers the bill to the Israeli people - for the subjugation of the Palestinians, the occupation, the wars, the internal social injustices, book after book, creation after creation." --Amoz Oz, novelist

I./ "My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma ."--Desmond Tutu, Nobel Laureate

J./ Sticker on a tour bus in Jerusalem filled with American Jews: "No one belongs here more than you!"

K./ "My pet peeve is nuclear war."-- Dick Cavett

L./ “People say to me, "What about Gaza? Don't have so much compassion for them, don't tell the Israelis to be nice there, tell [the Palestinians] to be nice there. And I say Gaza is a nightmare, and it's a stain on my conscience. And I'm very troubled by the attitude of Israelis against Israeli Arabs. It's a shame. It's a black hole in my democracy.”--Avram Burg

M./"My grandmother was ill in bed when the Naziscame to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers."-- Sir Gerald Kaufman, British MP and Orthodox Jew.

N./ Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus' -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.--Noam Chomsky

O./ He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Micah 4:3

P./ Purple, The Color.Author Alice Walker, from Gaza with Code Pink, says:"It's very important that they understand what is happening, and that we hold our own administration accountable.I feel that what is happening in the Middle East is very important because the situation is so volatile. "I love people, and I love children and I feel that the Palestinian child is just as precious as the African-American child, as the Jewish child."

Q./"There are of course Jews who are non-Zionists and even anti-Zionists. The ultra-Orthodox cult of Neturei Karta and the leftist cult of Noam Chomsky are notable examples. The former rejects any earthly attempt to interfere with God's messianic plan, while the latter abhors all forms of nationalism, especially successful ones." --Judea Pearl

R./ "There are two sides in the Middle East conflict: Jews and Arabs who want compromise, and Jews and Arabs who want to demonize and eradicate their neighbors." --Rob Eshman, the editor of LA's the Jewish Journal

S./ "There hasn't been a single Israeli government that has curbed illegal colonization of the West Bank. I have a hard time believing the "center" of Israeli politics is anything other than a black hole -- an event horizon beyond which no light can ever shine outward. All it does is keep sucking more into it and crushing it." --chaos 4700 on HuffPo

U./ "The Middle East is the worst place in which to set loose a military force even partly informed by Christian Zionism, seeing the state of Israel as God's instrument for ushering in the Messianic Age - damning Muslims, while defending Jews for the sake of their eventual destruction...Unbound Christian zealotry is inimical to the prudent use of force...made blind by faith." --James Carroll

V./ Palestinians shoot themselves in the foot and then Israel shoots them in the other foot because they fired first.-- Avi, a blogger

W./ "This was not a love boat, this was a boat of hate," Bibi Netanyahu said of the Turkish ferry, Mavi Marmara, raided by Israeli commandos.

X./ "The number of murders per capita is a third of that of the United States. Israel’s population has passed 7.5 million, more than nine times what it was at its birth in 1948, and is growing at 1.8 percent a year, a rate no other developed country approaches." --Ethan Bronner, NY Times

Y./ Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak to commandos involved in the flotilla raid when he visited them at their base in Atlit: "We live in the Middle East, in a place where there is no mercy for the weak and there aren't second chances for those who don't defend themselves."

Z./"Israel goes to sleep with memories of the Holocaust and wakes up to the Arab-Israeli conflict." Maxim

AA./ "In 1974 US foreign aid amounted to about 25 percent of Israeli gross domestic product (GDP). The aid has continued at roughly the same level, but given the massive growth of the Israeli economy, it now amounts to about 2.5 percent of Israeli GDP." George Friedman, Stratfor. That's alot of shekels!

BB./ "Why doesn't Netanyahu get it over with?Remove the Star of David and blue bars from the Israeli flag and hoist up the Jolly Roger. Piracy pays." - Stanley Heller

CC./ "Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.” Tony Judt

DD./ "Most Israelis were not transplanted latter-day agrarian socialists but young, prejudiced urban Jews who differed from their European or American counterparts chiefly in their macho, swaggering self-confidence, and access to weapons." --Tony Judt

EE./ "The Israeli policy of amimut, or opacity, prohibits acknowledging the existence of the country’s nuclear arsenal, which consists of more than 100 weapons, mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine (two of which are said by intelligence sources to be currently positioned in the Persian Gulf)." --Jeffrey Goldberg

FF./"Why should a bourgeois country be the world’s foremost recipient of foreign aid, with $3 billion a year from the United States? Why [does] Israel keep schnorring money from Diaspora Jews, and why [do] Diaspora Jews keep handing it over?”--Larry Derfner

GG./ "Many students of Jewish descent, myself included, conclude after majoring in Middle Eastern studies that Israel's post-1967 conduct and its attempt to paint its own colonialist ambitions as a universal Jewish concern constitute an affront to Jewish values and a chillul Hashem." --Evan Sholle

HH./ "We operate everywhere where we can hit terror infrastructure - in close places and in places further away." --Ehud Olmert

II./ "Israeli religious extremists demand American protection and then denounce the U.S. for 'interference' if we demur politely about colonization of the West Bank. " Christopher Hitchens